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Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles | Music | Set List | The A.V. Club Page 1 of 12 Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles By Will Harris October 11, 2011 The artist : In the waning weeks of 1980, Susanna Hoffs first ARTICLE TOOLS teamed with fellow guitarist Vicki Peterson and drummer Debbi 28 Peterson to form the band that would soon come to be called The Bangles . (Original bassist Annette Zilinskas left The Bangles shortly Like 477 before the group recorded its first album. Michael Steele, formerly of 5 The Runaways , assumed bass duties for most of the group’s career, but subsequently left the band.) Although they’ve occasionally dissolved for months or even years at a time since then, the group is currently more active than in ages, having returned to the studio—with Matthew Sweet in the producer’s seat, no less—to record Sweetheart Of The Sun , the first new Bangles album since 2003’s Doll Revolution . The Bangs, “Getting Out of Hand” (1981 7” single) MORE SET LIST Huey Lewis on Back To The Future , “We Are The World,” and more Author, songwriter, and provocateur Kinky Friedman talks about his would-be country hits ’70s hitmaker Paul Williams on having his songs sung by The Carpenters and The Muppets The Cult’s Ian Astbury talks about songs, ignoring the critics, and “sexual modality” Susanna Hoffs : Wow! Okay, well, that was our first single. We were basically just a club band at that point, and we were in the total do-it-yourself mode. We all had day jobs at the time. I worked in a ceramics factory, and Vicki worked on a movie lot, but… It was more of a grounds-supervisor kind of job. It wasn’t actually, like, working on films but just more management of the movie lot. And what was Debbi doing? I think Debbi was working at a ticket agency or something like that. I can’t remember. But, anyway, we went to a studio called Radio Tokyo that was owned and run by Ethan James, who had been for some period of time in the band Blue Cheer, and it was a really cool eight- track studio in Venice, California, on… Abbot Kinney Boulevard, I think, which is now populated with really cool stores and restaurants and stuff. It was kind of a really cool area to be working. It was my first official studio experience. Vicki wrote the song, and… I can’t remember the history of the writing part, but we went in and we made the record. The flip side of the single was a song called “Call On Me ,” which I think might’ve been the first song Vicki and I ever wrote together… and, actually, my friend David Roback, who was in the Rain Parade and then went on to do Mazzy Star, I think he co- wrote it with me and Vicki. But my memory isn’t totally clear on that. [Laughs.] You are digging back to the real obscure stuff, which is great, thank you. It’s fun to jog my memory now and go back to the early days! But I remember the record cost $35 to make, and David Roback took the photos for the little single sleeve. And it was a very important record for us, because it’s the record that I gave to Rodney Bingenheimer, the KROQ DJ who was known for playing obscure bands and getting them heard on the radio in Los Angeles. He had a big following on KROQ, and, yeah, it kind of got the ball rolling for us. As soon as Rodney started playing it, our shows started selling better, and it went from there. The A.V. Club: Did your pulse quicken as you handed Rodney the single? http://www.avclub.com/articles/susanna -hoffs -of -the -bangles,63099/ 19/ 07/ 2012 Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles | Music | Set List | The A.V. Club Page 2 of 12 SH : Oh , yeah. [Laughs.] I was very nervous. But I was also, like, very courageous at the time. When I think back on how ballsy I was about everything… It was youth and ignorance about what the music business was all about on my part. I was very green and very ambitious and very determined, and I think it was… an interesting time. Because the punk movement had happened, and there was a big shift in how things were in the music business. We went from stadium rock to the club scene again, but it was still the heyday of big record companies. But there wasn’t any sort of American Idol mentality out there, where you’re vetted by a team of music-biz experts, and that’s how you get known to the public at large. We were very grassroots about everything, and Rodney did a tremendous amount to get The Bangles heard. AVC: “Getting Out Of Hand” is actually credited to The Bangs. What’s the story behind the band changing its name to The Bangles? SH : Well, we ended up working with Miles Copeland as our manager, and he had a record company called Faulty Products, which then got changed to IRS Records sometime after the release of our EP. We worked with a wonderful producer called Craig Leon, and we made a five-song EP. The artwork was done, everything was ready, and Miles gets a phone call from a band in New Jersey called Bangs, and… We had to change our name. They basically said, “Pay us X amount of dollars if you really want to use the name,” dollars which we of course didn’t have at the time, and we had, like, 48 hours to think of a new name. We did have the artwork done, so it was somewhat practical three letters to the end of it. [Laughs.] So there was some pragmatism involved in the decision there. But it wasn’t just that. I mean, you know, we were sort of… We were not happy about having to rethink the name, because that’s one of the hardest things about being in a band: coming up with a name, one that hasn’t been taken or used in some form already. So we were just thinking of a thousand different possibilities, but in the end, when we came up with “Bangles,” it kind of had a ring to it that we liked. There was a little bit of “Beatles,” you know, being Beatlemaniacs. The Beatles were sort of a musical bond for The Bangles. The way we fashioned the band, the way we were a four-piece band and there were multiple singers and songwriters—they inspired a lot of things about The Bangles. And then we were looking up the definition of “Bangles” in the dictionary, and there was one definition that said, “To hang loose,” and we sort of thought that was kind of groovy and ’60s. In the end, I think it’s a better name for the band, weirdly. I would never have thought that back then, ’cause there was a kind of toughness to the Bangs. We were garage-pop. We were firmly rooted in the garage, so we liked the tough aspect of it. Having come out of a sort of post-punk movement in L.A. of pop bands, it was still a lot of the punk energy in the scene. Those were the reasons why we liked The Bangs, but in the end, I think The Bangles was a better name for us… or is a better name for us. The Bangles, “The Real World” (from 1982’s Bangles EP) SH : That was another one of the early songs that Vicki and I wrote together. I blatantly kind of fashioned it after… I think it was George Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone” and that whole era of The Beatles’ music. I wanted it to be kind of a jangly, guitar-driven love song in the spirit of that period of The Beatles’ stuff. Yeah, those early songs were my introduction to working with Vicki Peterson as a songwriting team, someone who I’ve now worked with for 30 years on and off. That was a lot of fun. That was one of the earliest ones we wrote together. AVC: “The Real World” was the single released from the EP, correct? SH : Yes, that’s right. There’s even a video for it out there somewhere! AVC: If we can find it, then you can pretty well count on it running right alongside your comments about the song. SH : [Laughs.] It was filmed at the Viper Room, by the way. What was formally The Central, on the Sunset Strip, and then became the Viper Room years later. Just in case anyone’s curious about that venue. AVC: What was it like stepping before the camera to make your first video? SH : Oh, wow. Well, everything was kind of exciting and a little terrifying in the early days. I mean, it was all firsts for me. Really, The Bangles were my first band, and, yeah, that was pretty much our first http://www.avclub.com/articles/susanna -hoffs -of -the -bangles,63099/ 19/ 07/ 2012 Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles | Music | Set List | The A.V. Club Page 3 of 12 video, come to think of it. And there’s even a scene, I believe, in the video that’s of a photo session. We had only just done our first professional photo sessions. It was all happening right around that time, and it was all very new to us.